Baseball season is upon us, so forgive me for starting a conversation about Port Huron's future with an analogy from the ballpark.
Our community keeps swinging for the fences, hoping for the home run that will propel us into a new era of prosperity, and we keep popping out to left field.
Casino. Aquarium. Bridge plaza. Marina motel. Desmond Landing. Sperry's. Terra
? ? ?
LAST WEEK, the chief judge of the federal courts in Grand Rapids ordered the Bay Mills Chippewa to close an unlicensed casino near Interstate 75 in Vanderbilt.
"Little Traverse Bay has clearly established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits," U.S. District Judge Paul L. Maloney wrote in granting relief to the Ottawa of Little Traverse, owners of a licensed casino on the outskirts of Petoskey.
Little Traverse's lawsuit against Bay Mills revolves around the Michigan Indian Claims Settlement Act, which President Bill Clinton signed into law 13 years ago.
Basically, the government acknowledged a long and sordid history of stealing from the Chippewa and Ottawa. The law settled old debts and set up trust funds for tribal groups such as Bay Mills and Little Traverse.
Earnings generated by those trust funds, the law says, "shall be used exclusively for improvements on tribal land or the consolidation and enhancement of tribal land holdings through purchase or exchange. Any land acquired with funds from the Land Trust shall be held as Indian lands are held."
? ? ?
AT FIRST GLANCE, the passage seems clear. Bay Mills cannot use its earnings to pay for European junkets or a fleet of Cadillacs. The tribe can spend the money only for improving or expanding tribal lands.
The tribal chairman, Jeff Parker, said Bay Mills was doing just that last year with its investments in Vanderbilt and Port Huron. Both deals were made exclusively with so-called "restricted fee" dollars, or earnings from the trust fund.
Indeed, this constraint explains why Acheson Ventures sold 16.5 acres at Desmond Landing, including the old post office on Military Street, for the bargain-basement price of $100,000. Bay Mills could not afford to pay much more using trust funds alone.
Parker insists Bay Mills has followed the law scrupulously, an opinion not shared by the judge.
In his ruling, Maloney emphasized the words "enhancement and consolidation." He said Bay Mills can add to its existing tribal lands -- enhancing them and consolidating them with nearby parcels -- but it cannot buy property just anywhere and claim it as sovereign Indian land.
"(The 1997 law) does not authorize Bay Mills to purchase the Vanderbilt tract from the earnings in the Land Trust," he concluded.
? ? ?
PARKER READILY admits Vanderbilt is a test run for the tribe's ultimate goal of putting a casino at Desmond Landing.
It has been two decades since Bay Mills and developer Mike Malik first tried to open a casino in downtown Port Huron. Their latest plan calls for remodeling the old post office as a temporary facility until a permanent casino and luxury hotel can be built at the foot of Court Street.
"We're preparing to fight this to the bitter end," Parker told WEYI, a television station in Saginaw. "We believe we are still in the right. We believe the judge may have made some assumptions that are not correct."
Malik once told me Bay Mills would hire 1,000 workers for the temporary casino and as many as 3,200 for the casino-hotel.
In baseball terms, that would be a grand slam.
? ? ?
IN GAMBLING terms, it looks like a long shot. So does the aquarium.
A few days ago, I bumped into Councilman Brian Moeller at the Maritime Center at Vantage Point. He told me city officials have met with no success in their search for investors in a commercial aquarium.
When I mentioned the baseball analogy, he laughed and said, "We were trying to hit a grand slam, and now we're striking out."
Ten months ago, City Council gave a New Zealand company $100,000 to study the project's feasibility. Port Huron taxpayers also have invested $430,000 in buying and razing the old YMCA as a potential site for a riverside aquarium. Another $150,000 went to buy a law office across Glenwood from the old Y.
"I can think of a lot of better ways to spend $680,000," added Moeller, a skeptic when it comes to what he calls "the fish tank."
? ? ?
HOME RUNS are dramatic, but a baseball game can be won without them. Perhaps it is time for Port Huron to focus on hitting line-drive singles.
Exciting things are happening in the city, and while they might not be home runs, they're still clean hits.
I am talking about loft apartments and restaurants, festivals and fishing tournaments, bicycle and boat tours, underwater cameras and public art. Brian Martin, founder of the grassroots Port Huron Initiative, can rattle off two dozen or more ongoing endeavors, all of them solid base hits.
Some might go for extra bases, in fact, such as the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse restoration or Jim Acheson's gift of land for a riverside promenade or Martin's plan to share live video of the annual sturgeon spawn off the Edison Parkway sea wall.
"Do many things outside the box and in the entrepreneurial spirit," Martin said. "Someone will look for ways to profit from it. That is the best way to rebuild a community. Genius begets genius!"
? ? ?
ED MORRISON, an economic policy adviser at the Purdue Center for Regional Development, could not agree more. Genius does beget genius.
"A sea change is starting," he told me in an e-mail. "People are moving ahead with their own collaborations, building regional economies with sophisticated projects."
In a place such as Port Huron, no force is more powerful than the spirit of collaboration.
Our history is replete with examples. When timber was king, Port Huron prospered with a dozen sawmills. In the following generation, the skill of its shipwrights made the city synonymous with boat building.
Manufacturing came next and grew stronger through collaboration. Mueller Brass would not have survived the Depression without a boost from Autolite. Grand Trunk's car shops might have been lost without Port Huron Engine & Thresher. Factories, foundries and paper plants fed off each other, so that the sum was greater than its parts.
? ? ?
IN A SENSE, nothing has changed even as everything changes. Yes, the factories and foundries are mostly gone, and the local economy is a hollow shell.
Yet the gifts that created Port Huron in the first place -- the rivers, the lake, the border, the people -- remain with us.
While the city has suffered, it could be so much worse given Michigan's uncanny knack for destroying cities. In half a century, Port Huron has lost 16% of its population, or one of every six people.
By comparison, Flint and Saginaw saw their populations decline by nearly 50% in 50 years. Detroit's implosion has cost it more than 60% of its population in 60 years.
Port Huron is only eight square miles, and a sizable chunk of that is reserved for a college, two high schools, two hospitals, parks, beaches, cemeteries, a border plaza, an industrial park, government buildings and the downtown shopping district.
The city has distressed neighborhoods, but rescuing them poses a difficult challenge, not an insurmountable one.
? ? ?
MORRISON, in his quest to unbuckle the Rust Belt, speaks of a concept called "strategic doing."
He describes it as "a simple, repeatable process to translate ideas into action." In simplest terms, a community figures out what its assets are and how those might be parlayed into prosperity.
Collaboration is essential, whether the asset is technology in Silicon Valley or chicken dinners in Frankenmuth. If a community becomes known for doing something well, it inevitably attracts talent and investment so that it does it even better. Genius begets genius.
And, while home runs are nice, line-drive singles are enough. Or, as Morrison puts it: "Big ideas. Small steps, relentlessly taken."
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
Copyright © 2024 ToCasino.net Online Casino. All Rights Reserved. Designed by